Category: TEOTWAWKI

“After the First World War, Shandor decided that society was too sick to survive.  He wasn’t alone.  He had close to a thousand followers when he died.  They conducted rituals up on the roof, bizarre rituals intended to bring about the end of the world.” – Ghostbusters

Well, he has a point.  I think I need to post this to my timeline!

Previous posts in this series include:

This is part five of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo )

The story to date:  Our resourceful protagonist was far from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of the society and the plentiful PEZ® it has provided.  He’s bicycled and walked until he’s only 60 miles from home, 58 hours after the EMP.

He’s just witnessed a Camaro pulling onto the road after hearing two shots in a farmhouse, and it was headed straight toward him.

EMP +2, 2:30 PM, 58 miles from home

The Camaro was half a mile away.  Hiding seemed like a good idea, but I looked to either side of the road there was no cover for 100 yards, and the camouflage poncho I was wearing consisted of dark greens and browns – it would be of no use against the straw yellow dead grass in the ditch here.

I stood motionless and waited.  I didn’t have long to wait.

The Camaro pulled to a stop in front of me.

The driver turned off the engine and soon enough a brushed nickel revolver was pointing at me out of the open window.  The thought entered my mind that he was holding the gun in his left hand, and maybe he wasn’t a good shot left handed.  But then I looked at the barrel again.  For whatever reason, the hole in the gun barrel looked as large as the full moon.  Betting that he would be a lousy shot with his left hand seemed like a lousy bet.

“Hands outside of the poncho.”

I slowly raised my arms to the side.

“Alright.  Hands above your head.  Lock your fingers together.  Slowly.”

I complied.  It’s not like I can run faster than a slug from the hand cannon he was holding, and, besides, I didn’t have anything to fight back with other than the cheap Chinese multi-tool that I had previously kept in my car as part of my emergency kit.

“Got a gun?”

I shook my head.  “Nope.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Millerville,” I replied.

“And where did you start?”

“Meridian.”

“You mean north of the Interstate Meridian?  That’s almost 200 miles away.”  He paused.  “How’d you get here so fast?”

“Bicycle, and then feet.”

“Impressive.  What did you see?”

“Can I put my hands down?”

“No.”

I sighed.  “Not much.  On the first day I just biked due south.  The next?  Due east.  Not a lot of people on the roads I picked.  I got shot at by the interstate running south from the City and lost my bike, but crossed under the Interstate on the railroad bridge.  Since then, I’ve been walking east.”

I still hadn’t seen the driver’s face – the sunlight reflected off of the car windshield.  I heard a single, humorless laugh.  “Unarmed.  Sixty miles from home.  I should just shoot you out of mercy.  Hell, I bet you haven’t even eaten since this started.”

The humorless laugh again.

He continued, “Okay.  Since you’ve obviously figured out that nothing electrical works anymore you understand, probably better than most, that civilization ain’t what it used to be.”

His arm withdrew back into the car, and I was relieved to see pistol disappear.

“For what it’s worth, the people in the farmhouse ahead are dead.  And I did kill them.  I’m the sheriff in this county, and I’ve been, well, taking out the trash today.  There are some people who will just be trouble, and they were pretty high on the list.

“If you really are going to Millerville, you should be armed.  There’s at least one pistol in there.  Probably some food.  So, go.  If I ever see you around our peaceful community again?  I’ll shoot you, too.  Now walk on over to that fence, and turn around and face the other direction until I drive off.  Good luck.”

I complied.  The engine on the Camaro roared back to life.  I heard the engine rev up and then the sound of the exhaust was up and over the little hill, lessening in volume continuously.

When I got to the farmhouse, the front door was open to the 1930’s or 1940’s era home.  There were two bodies on the couch in the front room, a man and a woman.  They looked to be in their early forties.  Both were dead.  I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a dead person – it had been at a funeral, my mom, I think.  Years.  And here were two dead people, dead less than an hour.  They had entrance wounds, center mass of their chest.  There was surprisingly little blood, but I imagined the back of the couch was a mess.  I wasn’t going to check.

Was the driver of the Camaro really a sheriff?  I had no idea.  I had no idea what these people had done.  A grudge, a score to settle?  Or?

It didn’t seem to matter to him to leave a witness alive, but in the end, he probably doesn’t care.  The chances of him seeing me again were nearly zero, and if the world ever did come back, the chances of him seeing me as a witness in court against him would also be effectively zero – I’d imagine the slowly cooling bodies in the next room wouldn’t matter to anyone left alive.  There’d be no one to press charges.

I’m embarrassed that I headed straight for their kitchen.

I skipped the refrigerator – it had been cold, but the power had been off for days.  They had a pantry, of sorts, behind a floral patterned curtain.  I looked around the kitchen – it was a mess.  Open containers of food on the counter.  Trash overflowing the trash can.  Dirty dishes everywhere.

In the pantry were an array of cans.  Corn.  Creamed corn.  I hated creamed corn.  But it never sounded so good to me.  Carrots.  Peaches.  Some pasta.

I looked around the mess on the counter.  Can opener.  Hmm.

There was an electric can opener, but there wasn’t a manual one on the counter.  I looked through the drawers, and couldn’t find one.  I remembered I had my cheap Chinese multitool – it didn’t have one, either.  But it did have a punch.  I put the punch up against the metal lid of the can, and smacked it with the base of another can.  Success – a small hole.  I repeated on the other side.  Another hole.  Since these were peaches, I decided that I could just start by drinking the juice.

It was the best thing I’d ever had in my life, sticky sweet, and tasting of summer.

I finally found a hammer in another drawer, and used it and my multi tool to poke a lot of holes in the can.  I used the needle nose pliers on the multitool to rip the small bridges of metal up, until I had a hole big enough to get an actual peach out with a fork I found in a drawer.

They were amazing.

When I got to the second can of corn, I cut my finger on the ripped up lid, deeply.  I dripped blood on the floor as I went to the bathroom and found some topical antibiotic and a bandage.

I wondered how long until a tube of Neosporin® would be worth more than gold.  I guessed that the answer was that it already was.  After wrapping up my finger, I looted the medicine cabinet, dumping everything into my bag – nobody would be making more medicine anytime soon.

As I walked back toward the kitchen to finish the corn, I saw an actual Leatherman® multitool on a dresser in a bedroom.  I checked – it had a can opener.  I went back to the kitchen.  Slowly, but steadily I opened the next can of food.

It was about 10 minutes after I finished eating, while I was looking for guns and ammunition, that the pain hit my abdomen.  I doubled over as waves of pain hit me.  I almost didn’t make the toilet before . . . well, before I needed to get there.  But I did make it.

After scrounging around, I found an old .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol – how old?  It looked like it might have been old enough to have served with Patton in World War Two.  There were twenty-odd rounds of ammunition and two magazines – a perfect match.  I also found some really old rifles in a closet, but no ammunition for them.

But in the hall closet?  The mother lode.  A sleeping bag and a small tent.

I put enough food into the bag for three days.  I hoped that would be enough to get me home . . . .

I left the house.  Maybe if I were a better person, I’d have buried the couple on the couch.  As it was, I was thinking more of me than them.  I headed east.  And I kept walking.

### (Until Next Week)

My guess is as we enter the third day, people are starting to get a little crazy, and not ex-girlfriend crazy, but Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre® crazy.  Our current society is built upon lots and lots of information, along with lots and lots of luxury.  I define luxury here as “stuff that’s not required to live.”  Day three will bring a deficit of both. As the snow storm pounds the East Coast and they have an epic battle to just stay alive.  In the Midwest?  Sparsely populated, and (during this story) unseasonably warm.

This meme was found here (LINK).  

What goes through someone’s head when the Sun is shining, the weather is nice, but the car won’t work, the stores are closed, and there is absolutely no information coming from anywhere?  Nothing good.  And this will be combined with declining supplies at home.

The average house has less than three days’ worth of food on hand.  The average store has less than three days’ worth of inventory.  But the stores are closed.  On day one, some people are out of diapers.  On day three?  Half the people are out of food.  And none of them know what is going on.  On day four?  We’ll get to that next week.

This meme was found here (LINK).

The reaction of the “sheriff” was an interesting one.  First, he wanted to know about what our hero had seen.  His communication channels are nearly certainly down, and getting any kind of information would be helpful in protecting his town.  Also, it looks like, he’s figured out that things will never return to normal.  That’s another unsettling thing – people won’t go after witnesses.  Why would they?  Authority is simply gone.

Would a sheriff proactively go after the bad guys after TEOTWAWKI – “taking out the trash” as he called it?  Maybe.  A good sheriff would know the troublemakers, the ones likely to cause trouble.  A good sheriff would know which people got off on a technicality.  And even a good sheriff might have a grudge.

Would scores be settled?  As to old vendettas being settled – that’s a certainty.  People are pretty good at keeping grudges, and there are some actions that are kept in check only by the threat of prison.  On day one, you’d see this behavior – scores being settled – in any medium to large size city.  On day three?  That city would be tearing itself apart.  Small, rural areas wouldn’t see that behavior that soon.  We all know each other.  To a certain extent, the Wilder family is still the new guys on the block, and we’ve lived in this house for a decade.

Regardless, as the sheriff said:  “Civilization ain’t what it used to be.”

Medicine now appears as a first time topic.  We take the current miracles of our age, antibiotics, antibiotic creams, and sterile bandages as commonplace.  And they are.  They’re also amazingly inexpensive.  However, in the past this wasn’t the case.  A simple cut on a finger if it resulted in infection, could lead to death.

Lastly, people are used to eating consistent amounts of food daily.  After intermittent (involuntary) fasting, digestive systems will change.  Yeah.  A small detail.  And maybe I’ve already said too much about that.

Yeah.  Digestive systems are icky.

“She’s the last of the V8 Interceptors.” – Mad Max

So, the only perfect car after the apocalypse is a V8 Interceptor, right?  But what does insurance cost after the end of the world as we know it?

This is part five of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde)

EMP +2, 2PM, 60 miles from home.

I could hear the big V8 engine coming about a mile away.

And that was good, because I had no idea who was driving it.  As much as I’d have loved to hitchhike home, I had the gut feeling that anyone putting that much gas into the engine had a purpose in mind that didn’t involve taking me home.

I broke for the ditch on my right, and the dubious cover of the small tree beyond – the only cover for 40 yards.

I was still wearing the camouflaged poncho – it was nearly uncomfortably warm, even on a 50°F day.  But it had the benefit of not being orange.  I got behind the tree, got low, and stayed still.

Forty seconds later a 1960’s era Camaro topped the small rise and blew past me on the road, loudly.

As the high pitch dopplered into a low pitch as it passed me and moved away I guessed that the owner had taken considerable liberty with the state laws that governed noise reduction – the car was loud, uncomfortably loud.  And it didn’t slow down – whether or not it had seen me hiding behind the shrub.  Where ever they were going, whatever they were doing, it didn’t involve me.

That was good.

After a minute, I got up, and started walking again, east, following the Camaro.

Walking is boring.  Boring, boring, boring.  Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, was also quite a philosopher – and in what was probably a pretty dismal day he wrote the following:  “People distract themselves so they don’t have time to think about how wretched they are.”  It’s not exactly what he said – he was French, but it’s close enough.

But the boredom was alternating with apprehension.  My family was miles away, and I had no idea what was happening with them.  The good news:  they had been at home.  If it weren’t winter, they would have slept through their alarms, since their alarms were all electronic, and most of them were hooked directly to the Internet, and none of that was coming back soon.  But since it was winter, someone, probably my wife, had woken up when it got cold in our bedroom.  And knew something was wrong.

They were smart, though, and I imagined that they would have figured out pretty soon that the lights were gone for good.  At least I hoped they would.  We had actually spent time talking about it, more as a thought experiment, a “what would you do if” conversation on the deck on the mild spring and fall evenings.  My apprehension was like my apprehension about being on the road – my sons and wife would be fine, except for . . . other people.  Like the people in the Camaro.  Random people who had needs, desires, or bad blood.

Borehension?  Apprehendom?  Not sure there was a word for it.  But I kept going, one foot in front of the other down the road.

The third emotion I felt was hunger.

I’m not sure that I’d ever really been hungry, in my entire life.  I was only on the second day of this trip, and I hadn’t eaten.  The emergency food rations in my backpack – 6000 calories – were five years old.  I’d never rotated them.  And they’d been kept in the trunk of my car on 110°F days during five summers.

What causes food to go bad?  Heat, light, and age.  My trunk had given them two out of three.  When I opened the package, what wasn’t hard as a rock was rotten.

I threw it away before I got hungry so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat it.  It was heavy, and it was useless.

I couldn’t remember when the last time I had gone a day without food.  It was probably a few years ago.  But there hadn’t been many of them.  Now I was on my second day without food, and I had probably been burning 10,000 calories a day between biking, walking, and shivering at night in the cold.

But this part of the Midwest was nice for walking.  It was flat, and the roads ran straight – unless there was a river, lake, or hill, the roads went due north and due south, and there was one nearly every mile.  And I needed to head due East, so I kept going East.

And my feet hurt.  I worried about getting blisters.  If I had to finish this on foot, which looked likely at this point, blisters were my biggest enemy.  Outside of people I didn’t know.  Like the guys in the Camaro.

As I crested the next small rise I saw another farmhouse about a half mile off.  The Camaro was there.

I stopped and sat down, off the road, back into the ditch to watch.  No reason to highlight my silhouette against the ridgeline.

Two gunshots.  Separated by about fifteen seconds.

A minute later, two people got walked out of the house and got into the Camaro®, and started it up with a load roar.  They backed up, and then the tires threw out gravel as the driver gunned the engine, fishtailing as they straightened out the car onto the main road.

Headed straight back toward me.  And I had no illusions.  They were armed.  And their intentions weren’t good.

And I was a witness.

Meanwhile, in the big city to the north . . .

Tim looked out and saw that three houses in the next block were on fire.  He had gone to help, but all he could do was stand outside with neighbors that he’d never talked to as everything they owned burned.  He’d thought about inviting them to his house, but, again, he didn’t know them.  Maybe their next door neighbors would invite them in.  Or maybe there was an empty house they could stay in, until things returned back to normal.

He and his wife, Arlene, had some firewood, and had kept the house warm that first night, but now the firewood was low.  They mainly used the fireplace on Saturday nights, only.  And that was for atmosphere.

Tim had walked the half mile to the supermarket, and saw that it was closed.  But it wasn’t closed.  The windows had been broken out, and walking through the sliding doors that had been permanently pulled open, and nothing but darkened chaos inside.  Tim didn’t see a single item on the shelves, as far as he could see.  Nothing.  The store was empty.

Tim walked back home.  Not a car on the streets.  At his front door, he called out, “Arlene-ee, I’m home.”  No answer.

His next door neighbor, who he had stood with as his house burned, came down the hall.

“Can I help you?”

### (Until Next Week)

I typed in “Cover, Concealment, and Camouflage” into my browser.  What popped up?  The first link was Crosman®, the BB and pellet gun manufacturer.  On their page, they have copied the USMC Marine Rifle Squad Field Manual.  I guess I love these guys now.  Oh, who am I kidding.  I already have a pellet pistol and rifle from them.  Here’s their link (LINK).

Cover is what protects you from being shot, like a log, a tank, or hiding behind your mom – to be clear, not my mom, but your mom.  Concealment is what protects you from being seen, like a log, a tree, a hill, or hiding behind your mom.  And Camouflage is the use of manmade and natural material to avoid being seen, like incorporating brush to break up your outline, or using mud or charcoal to make sure your face doesn’t shine, or using camouflage clothing to blend in.  Your mom is awful camouflage, since she can be seen from space, and everyone stares at her because she’s so big.

But when moving through territory where you’re a stranger, or, you just don’t want to be seen?  Concealment and camouflage are critical.  Except they won’t work for your mom – she couldn’t hide behind a hot air balloon.  But your momma didn’t read Pascal.

Guess this was before Facebook®?

Pascal really did say something like the quote in the story.  He really was quite a philosopher – his book, Pensees, published in 1670 (read it here for free), showed that even back then mankind had a tendency to want to distract themselves so that they didn’t have to think about their actions.  “People distract themselves so they don’t have time to think about how wretched they are.”  Yup.  We do.

Back then?  Books were the distractions.  Then plays.  Music.  Radio.  Television.  Comic books.  Video games.  The Internet – Facebook®, Twitter©, SnapCat™, and MySpace®.  Everyone’s still on Myspace®, right?  And don’t forget work.  Anything so you don’t have to think about yourself, the consequences of your actions, and if you’re doing the things that follow your values, or, if religious, the values of your religion.

Yeah, tough.

Now imagine being in the culture where we are surrounded by Weapons of Mass Distraction on a continual basis.  And then they’re all gone – except for books and comics.

What will that do psychologically to the survivors?  I mean, you’ve lost everything, but the biggest thing you’ve lost is the ability to forget yourself.  I imagine depression and suicide will be pretty popular – people who will end themselves rather than confront themselves.  I sure hope you all like that quote when I put it on Facebook® complete with a cat or a bikini girl sitting on a 1960’s Camaro©!

And, yup.  A 1960’s era Camaro® has no systems to be impacted by an EMP.

Imagine, all of these things will work after an EMP. 

Americans, for the most part, haven’t felt hunger since the Depression®.  There isn’t a lot of evidence that many Americans died during the Depression™ due to hunger, but there were plenty of people that were hungry, but even then few people died due to malnutrition.

To clarify how pampered we are as a society:  a day or two after Hurricane Katrina, my wife and I were watching the coverage of that unfolding tragedy.  Someone on CNN® got on the air and said that PEOPLE WERE EATING PEOPLE IN THE SUPERDOME® DUE TO HUNGER.  Now, like I’ve said before, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a day without food.  But to go full cannibal after two or three days?  What?

I mean, if I was really hungry . . . maybe . . .

NO!

NO ONE EATS SOMEONE AFTER THREE DAYS WITHOUT FOOD.  NO ONE.

I mean, unless that was a normal thing for them from before.

But we are so very used to a normal flow of calories that it’s difficult for anyone to conceive of going a day without food.  What about a week?  Two weeks?

After an EMP that would certainly happen people will get hungry.  And that’s not unusual during human history.  During the Medieval times, what did the peasants do?  Drink and party all winter?  No.  They huddled in cold houses under blankets after eating the bare minimum to survive the winter.  They hardly did anything all winter long.  Because they were peasants.  And it sucked.  And their wifi was really slow, too.  But they didn’t get blisters.  Just kidding, they got lots of blisters, because they were peasants.

Blisters are horrible, and can cause fatal infections if not properly treated.  Thankfully our protagonist has extra socks, disinfectant, and Neosporin® if he gets a blister.  But they will ruin his progress if they get too bad.  But he can count on his neighbors to help, right?

Well, not necessarily.  How well do you know your neighbors?  I was sitting outside tonight making sure The Boy didn’t inadvertently crush himself as he changed the oil in the Wildermobile®.  He was using jack stands under the front axle for the first time, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t mess up.  Thankfully, I only had to offer two or three life-saving tips, and three or four car-saving tips.

What showed up while I watched him work?

A neighbor dog.  A sweet terrier with a flowered collar and a Denver Broncos® bandana.  Which of my neighbors liked the Broncos®?  They’re not a team in favor, here.  It wasn’t my new neighbors to the north.  Maybe the new ones to the northeast?  Sadly, even here in rural Upper South Midwestia, I don’t know my neighbors well enough.  Modern life seems to be set up to separate us – we have little time between work and kid sports and kid clubs and everything else.

We’ll see what happens to Tim, but it’s not likely that he’ll be with us too long.  He seems woefully unprepared.  Like your mom.

“I thought I was prepared.  I knew the theory, I . . . reality’s different.” – Interstellar

Heh heh.  During the hurricane we were in, I think we gained weight.

This is part III of a series of life after an Electromagnetic Pulse Takes down much of the electronics that form the systems that allow us to live our lives in the relative luxury we have today . . . part I is here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You) and part II is here (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)).  As always, comments on inaccuracies are welcome – I’ve learned quite a bit about our systems writing these, and love getting the feedback to make them more realistic.

Okay, back to the story . . . our hero has realized that an EMP has occurred, secured transportation, and is heading home.

THE TOWN HAD BEEN quiet as I had pedaled through.  Not many people are out at 3am, and almost none of them are happy about it.  In a town this size, I bet there wasn’t more than one cop on duty when the power went away.

The wind was at my back, and a pretty stiff one today.  It was okay.  The road was clear of traffic and there’s a stillness when you’re going the same speed as the wind.  It’s odd – you are travelling at 20 miles per hour (same as the wind), but there is not a hint of wind.  It’s also nice, because when you bicycle in cool air, your feet and hands get very cold.  Because you’re going with the wind, you can hear much better than someone just standing outside in the wind – your senses aren’t supernatural, but it certainly feels that way.

South out of town with the north wind at my back, I thought about the trip ahead.  I’d become so used to using either my phone for a map or the GPS that I knew there wasn’t one in the car.  It had been a long time since I’d seen a map in a convenience store.  Heck, it had been a long time since I’d seen a magazine in one.  But the trip ahead was fairly simple – head south and then head east.  That was where home was.

There was one big city between here and home – hundreds of thousands of people.

And that was the danger.  It wasn’t cold.  It wasn’t planes falling from the sky.  It was people.  And there were, probably, about a million between me and home.  The last thing I wanted to do was to go through them, even if I could do it today before things became really chaotic.

My bet was that I could head south and then loop around to the east.  From memory, there weren’t many people at all along that route, and if I could make 120 miles or so, I could turn east.

And it was mostly quiet.

For the most part, all of the little towns I passed through might have a gas station and a small diner, but the route I was on was pretty unpopulated.

About hour two, or forty miles according to the mile markers, I heard a low rumbling off to the east.  I pulled the bike to a stop and looked.  A small, bright orange spot was visible on the horizon, with a thick, black cloud beginning to form above it.

I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack and took a long drink.  Nice thing about the day being cool was the water was cool, too, about 60°F.

I wondered for a second on what could have caused the explosion on the horizon.  I vaguely recalled that there was a crude oil refinery off in that direction.  Yeah, that was probably it.  Refineries are run very efficiently, and lots and lots of automated valves and switches and such allowed them to run with only a few people.  But all of those were electronic.  Looks like something failed.

As I watched, in fairly quick succession I saw two more fireballs.  I straddled my bike and waited.  About a minute and a half later, I heard the twin rumbles from the new explosions.  Fifteen miles?  Twenty?  Certainly far enough that I don’t have to worry about hazardous vapors on this trip.  I put the bottle back in my pack and continued pedaling.  There are things I can fix and things I can’t.  Exploding refineries after an EMP were definitely in the latter category.

Most of the small towns had forgettable names and were so small that I was through them in three or four blocks, and they looked mostly deserted, though I did see smoke from quite a few chimneys.  The strength in this area, at least, is that most of the actual homes (versus the trailer homes) were built back before piped in natural gas, before electricity.  They’d be warm, as long as the inhabitants had wood to burn.  Of course, there’d be house fires as chimneys not used in decades were used by people who’d not used a fireplace or woodstove in as many decades.

At last I came to a big enough city that I’d heard the name before.  It looked to be a mile or so on a side.  I decided it was a city that was big enough that I didn’t want to risk going through it.

I decided to skirt it to the east – it looked like the most of the city was to the west of the road that I was on, so, a quick detour a mile west might be all that I needed to do.

After going a mile east, I turned south again.  A mile later?  I was staring at a dead end, caused by a river.

It was noon.  I had two options.  I could head back to the city, where I was reasonably certain that there was a bridge, or I could head farther east, where, in sparsely populated country like this I might not see another bridge for miles.

I decided to chance the city.  It was small, I told myself, and a lone guy on a bicycle wasn’t much of a threat, right?  Although my legs were getting a bit tired (I hadn’t biked in three years) I felt a surge of adrenaline as I neared the city.  I got up speed.  It turned out this road entered the city right at the bridge.  There were a few people at the bridge, but no physical barriers or any sort of road block.  There were a few shouted questions “Hey, what’s going on out there?” as I went by, but that was all.  I just smiled and waved.

I noticed some of the men were armed, but nobody raised a weapon toward me as I headed away from the town.

I kept on going south without further incident.  I headed east, more or less directly toward home after I’d gone about 120 miles south.  No hypotenuse for me.  Straight south, then straight east.

I turned east in another quiet, small town.  I pedaled with the mild evening wind for about an hour until I came to a small streambed.

It was secluded, three miles since the last house, and there were trees all around the stream.  Good.  I found firewood, plus a small, secluded grassy patch.  I got some small sticks, and piled up some of the sandstone from the creek bed for a fire ring.  I pulled out my knife and turned one stick into a “fuzz stick” – a lot of small, shallow cuts into the stick, leaving the wood together so that it looked like a fuzzy stick when done.  If you don’t have paper – it’s a great way to start a fire since it has so much surface area.  I also gathered handfuls of dried, dead grass (easy to find in February!) and added in some very small sticks.

If you don’t have lots of matches, make each one count.  Spend the time preparing to make the fire before you strike the match.  And I had no idea if I could even make it home in three days.  A big snowstorm might set me back for days, or weeks.  And how many matches did we have at home?  It was time to save them all.

The small fire was nice.  I’m not sure if it was the light or the warmth, but it was pleasant, unlike my butt, which was very sore, and I’m sure I’d feel fire in my legs tomorrow.  As I went to sleep that night in my makeshift tarp-tent, I was completely unaware that this would be my last completely peaceful day until I got home.

### (until next Monday)

The first day after a catastrophe like this is bound to be filled with a tremendous amount of inaction – nobody will know quite what to do.  Everyone will walk by the switch on the wall and flip it, expecting, believing that the light will come on.  We’ve been conditioned for that.  Ultimately, the vast majority of people will believe that things will return to normal, even when it’s clear that they never will.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks in his book The Black Swan about how his family talks about what they’ll do when Lebanon returns to normal, which at this point no one thinks will ever happen, even though the Civil War that tore Lebanon apart started in 1975, 43 years ago.  Lebanon had been one of the most advanced countries on earth, but now large areas of the country are considered “no go” for almost anyone with a modicum of sanity.  But people expect that one day . . . it will return to normal.

This is wonderful.  If the lights are going to come back on, slaughtering that neighbor that played the music really loud (Bon Jovi?  Really?) while you were trying to sleep is a bad idea.  If the lights are done?  So is that neighbor.  Scores will be settled, especially if it involves Bon Jovi.

During that first day, people will begin to understand that maybe this catastrophe is different.  Outside of every catastrophe that has hit the United States in history, this one isn’t regional.  90% of the unaffected population won’t be available to turn to for help, which happens today after a hurricane or volcano or Rosie O’Donnell-created earthquake.

A regional incident means that the region is going to be helped.  A national or global event?  You’re on your own.  Every rule changes.  Think you own that second house down by the lake?  I think the family that moved into it might not care.  And neither will the sheriff.

But there is one place where the time delay between civilization and Mad Max® level insanity is thinnest:

Modern cities.

Win a sports title in a modern city and you can be happy if only two people are killed and the arson is limited to a small area near downtown.  The larger the city, the quicker the violence hits, and the more violent it will be.  Google® “Selco” if you want to hear the grim stories from his survival in the cities during the Balkans War in the 1990’s.  And those were cities that had spent years under the Communist® system with people who were used to working around failing systems.  Imagine Baltimore when things go really bad?

Again, in a catastrophe like this – avoid cities and other people at all costs.

I hinted around that there are other infrastructure pieces that will have issues after an EMP.  Refineries, pipelines, and power plants are absolutely dependent upon control systems that pull data from the boiling oil or high pressure natural gas and use it to make decisions. Many times those decisions are made at millisecond speed via computer without any input from a human required.  And without those systems?  At best, the pipelines and refineries and power plants won’t work.  At worst?  Systems that are used for safety won’t work.  Normally, everything is designed to go to a safe state.  But those safe states often rely on there being power, even battery power.  There will be some failures in those safety systems.  If we’re lucky, it just wrecks equipment, and not result in huge fireballs.

Nuclear power plants are a special case (and not in a good way), which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Oh, and the fuzz stick thing?  It works really well.